東京計画2019

English

• Plans for TOKYO 2019

  Guest Curator: Tomoko Yabumae (Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo)

  Ahead of the countdown towards hosting its second Olympic games, Tokyo continues to change with great force. While redevelopments have led to neatly restructuring the urban landscape, Tokyo’s distinct feature as a collective of cities with multiple characteristics is gradually diminished, and as measures towards uniformization and homogenization progress, people’s behaviors are also influenced. This year’s αM Project transfers these various aspects to the gallery through the practices of five groups of artists, and while paying consideration to its underlying issues attempts to deviate from monolithic experiences, systems and identities to present different possibilities. The title of this exhibition series is based on “A Plan for Tokyo 1960” proposed by architect Kenzo Tange Laboratory in 1960, at a time of high economic and industrial growth in the wake of postwar turmoil as Japan progressed towards the 1964 Tokyo Olympic games. With plans that took into account the bay area and the construction of mammoth high-rise buildings, Tange’s unrealized urban scheme had proposed expanding the Tokyo metropolis both out towards the sea and to its skyline, thus beautifully shaping his vision of development and growth. While Tokyo’s explosive development was predicted, in the United States where urbanization had already started to come to a standstill, a woman named Jane Jacobs had in the following year criticized large-scale and monolithic development policies to instead present an urban image from the perspective of its dwellers that existed as a diverse patchwork of different elements. More than half a century since such times however, Tokyo still holds on to its dream of a being a vast metropolis and continues to be a setting for an endless cycle of scrap & build. Does the city still function as an effective system in guaranteeing happiness for the lives of the people who live within it? I hope that this series of exhibitions could serve as a platform in providing clues and guidelines for surviving the days that follow the storm of festivities.

  Guest Curator

  ▊Tomoko Yabumae ▊ Tomoko Yabumae is the Curator of Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. Yabumae has curated numerous exhibitions including ‘Shinro Ohtake; Zen-Kei Retrospective 1955-2006’ (2006) ‘MOT Collection Kenjiro Okazaki’ (2009-10), ‘Sayoko Yamaguchi: The Wearist, Clothed in the Future’ (2015), ‘An Art Exhibition for Children: Whose place is this?’(2015), ‘MOT satellite 2017 Spring -by the deep rivers’ and ‘Weavers of Worlds – A Century of Flux in Japanese Modern / Contemporary Art (2019)’. She participated ‘Sapporo International Art Festival 2017’ as one of a member of the curatorial team. Her writings on modern and contemporary Japanese art have appeared in a number of journals, magazines and website in Japan.